Say you have this bit of HTML:
<p>I am a paragraph of text that has a few words in it.</p>Then you write this CSS for it:
p {
width: 100px;
height: 50px;
padding: 20px;
border: 1px solid;
}The content would break out of your element and it would be 142px wide, rather than 100px. Why is that? The box model is a core foundation of CSS and understanding how it works, how it is affected by other aspects of CSS and importantly, how you can control it will help you to write more predictable CSS.
A really important thing to remember when writing CSS, or working on the web
as a whole, is that everything displayed by CSS is a box. Whether that's a
box that uses border-radius to look like a circle, or even just
some text: the key thing to remember is that it's all boxes.
Content and sizing #
Boxes have different behavior based on their display value,
their set dimensions, and the content that lives within them. This content
could be even more boxes—generated by child elements—or plain text content.
Either way, this content will affect the size of the box by default.
You can control this by using extrinsic sizing, or, you can continue to let the browser make decisions for you based on the content size, using intrinsic sizing.
Let's quickly look at the difference, using a demo to help us.
The demo has the words, "CSS is awesome" in a box with fixed dimensions and
a thick border. The box has a width, so is extrinsically sized. It controls
the sizing of its child content. The problem with this though, is that the
word "awesome" is too large for the box, so it overflows outside of the
parent box's border box (more on this later in the lesson).
One way to prevent this overflow is to allow the box to be intrinsically
sized by either unsetting the width, or in this case, setting the
width to be min-content. The
min-content keyword tells the box to only be as wide as the
intrinsic minimum width of its content (the word "awesome"). This allows the
box to fit around "CSS is awesome", perfectly.
Let's look at something more complex to see the impact of different sizing on real content:
Toggle intrinsic sizing on and off to see how you can gain more control with extrinsic sizing and let the content have more control with intrinsic sizing. To see the effect that intrinsic and extrinsic sizing has, add a few sentences of content to the card. When this element is using extrinsic sizing, there's a limit of how much content you can add before it overflows out of the element's bounds, but this isn't the case when intrinsic sizing is toggled on.
By default, this element has a set width and
height—both 400px. These dimensions give strict
bounds to everything inside the element, which will be honored unless the
content is too large for the box in which case visible overflow will happen.
You can see this in action by changing the content of the caption, under the
flower picture to something that exceeds the height of the box, which is a
few lines of content.
Key Term: When content is too big for the box it is in,
we call this overflow. You can manage how an element handles overflow
content, using the overflow property.
When you switch to intrinsic sizing, you are letting the browser make decisions for you, based on the box's content size. It's much more difficult for there to be overflow with intrinsic sizing because our box will resize with its content, rather than try to size the content. It's important to remember that this is the default, flexible behavior of a browser. Though extrinsic sizing gives more control on the surface, intrinsic sizing provides the most flexibility, most of the time.
The areas of the box model #
Boxes are made up of distinct box model areas that all do a specific job.
You start with content box, which is the area that the content lives in. As you learned before: this content can control the size of its parent, so is usually the most variably sized area.
The padding box surrounds the content box and is the space
created by the
padding
property. Because padding is inside the box, the background of the box will
be visible in the space that it creates. If our box has overflow rules set,
such as overflow: auto or overflow: scroll, the
scrollbars will occupy this space too.
The border box surrounds the padding box and its space is
occupied by the border value. The border box is the bounds of
your box and the border edge is the limit of what you can
visually see. The
border
property is used to visually frame an element.
The final area, the margin box, is the space around your
box, defined by the margin rule on your box. Properties such as
outline
and
box-shadow
occupy this space too because they are painted on top, so they don't affect
the size of our box. You could have an outline-width of
200px on our box and everything inside and including the border
box would be exactly the same size.
A useful analogy #
The box model is complex to understand, so let's recap what you've learned with an analogy.
In this diagram, you have three photo frames, mounted to a wall, next to each other. The diagram has labels that associate elements of the frame with the box model.
To break this analogy down:
- The content box is the artwork.
- The padding box is the white matte, between the frame and the artwork.
- The border box is the frame, providing a literal border for the artwork.
- The margin box is the space between each frame.
- The shadow occupies the same space as the margin box.
Debugging the box model #
Browser DevTools provide a visualisation of a selected box's box model calculations, which can help you understand how the box model works and importantly, how it is affecting the website you're working on.
Go ahead and try this in your own browser:
- Open DevTools
- Select an element
- Show the box model debugger
Controlling the box model #
To understand how to control the box model, you first need to understand what happens in your browser.
Every browser applies a user agent stylesheet to HTML documents. The CSS
used varies between each browser, but they provide sensible defaults to make
content easier to read. They define how elements should look and behave if
there's no CSS defined. It is in the user agent styles where a box's default
display is set, too. For example, if we are in a normal flow, a
<div> element's default display value is
block, a <li> has a default
display value of list-item, and a
<span> has a default display value of
inline.
An inline element has block margin, but other elements won't
respect it. Use inline-block, and those elements will respect
the block margin, while the element maintains most of the same behaviors it
had as an inline element. A block item will, by
default, fill the available inline space, whereas a
inline and inline-block elements will only be as
large as their content.
Alongside an understanding of how user agent styles affect each box, you
also need to understand box-sizing, which tells our box how to
calculate its box size. By default, all elements have the following user
agent style: box-sizing: content-box;.
Having content-box as the value of
box-sizing means that when you set dimensions, such as a
width and height, they will be applied to the
content box. If you then set padding and
border, these values will be added to the content box's size.
The actual width of this box will be 260px. As the CSS uses the default
box-sizing: content-box, the applied width is the width of the
content, padding and border on both sides are
added to that. So 200px for the content + 40px of padding + 20px of border
makes a total visible width of 260px.
You can control this, though, by making the following modification
to use the alternative box model, border-box:
.my-box {
box-sizing: border-box;
width: 200px;
border: 10px solid;
padding: 20px;
}
This alternative box model tells CSS to apply the width to the
border box instead of the content box. This means that our
border and padding get pushed in, and as
a result, when you set .my-box to be 200px wide:
it actually renders at 200px wide.
Check out how this works in the following interactive demo. Notice that when
you toggle the box-sizing value it shows—via a blue
background—which CSS is being applied inside our box.
*,
*::before,
*::after {
box-sizing: border-box;
}
This CSS rule selects every element in the document and every
::before and ::after pseudo element and applies
box-sizing: border-box. This means that every element will now
have this alternative box model.
Because the alternative box model can be more predictable, developers often add this rule to resets and normalizers, like this one.